Welcome

Putting Fieldwork on Indigenous Languages to New Uses is a São Paulo School on Advanced Sciences, supported by the São Paulo State Research Foundation (FAPESP), and will be held from March 21th to April 2nd, at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil.

The purpose of this school is twofold: (i) to introduce early career researchers to the latest developments in data collection and linguistic research on native languages, and (ii) to pave the way for new uses of linguistic fieldwork, with mutual benefits for both linguists and the indigenous populations. Drawing on the vast experience of the researchers of the several partner institutions in documentation, corpus linguistics and formal linguistic theory, we will present/discuss possibilities not previously pursued: extensive comparison across native languages to build taxonomies and phylogenetic models of transmission, oral corpora and a new objective and unbiased grammatical terminology, reflecting the speakers' original intuitions and potentially revealing truly universal building blocks of language and cognition. All these new tools should feed into literacy projects for the local communities, raising their own meta-linguistic and cultural awareness (in a non-intrusive way).

We expect grad students, postdoc researchers and young professors from several universities of Brazil and abroad, resulting in about 100 students.

Courses:

Languages and cultures of Brazil

Introduction to phylogetic methods in Linguistics

How to work on digital oral corpora syntactic annotation

Experimental and computational methods in Phonology and Morphology

Music, Language, and Documentation in Australia

Experimenting semantics, number and language.

Information on FAPESP funded São Paulo Schools on Advanced Sciences can be found in the following Links: